The Exchange: Rachel Shukert on Memoir Writing, Jewish Identity, and the Dutch Love of Phil Collins

It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the Eurail pass: girl moves to Europe, embarks on regrettable romances with men who barely speak her language, works menial jobs, and in the process, learns something about herself. But with her new memoir, “Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour,” Rachel Shukert manages to do something nearly unprecedented in the female travelogue subgenre: she is funny. “Everything Is Going to Be Great” recounts Shukert’s sojourns in Paris, Vienna, and finally, Amsterdam, where, after some harrowing misadventures, she meets her future husband. Viewed from Shukert’s charmingly candid perspective, Europe is a land rife with comically phallic meats, reasonable attitudes toward health care, and maddeningly infrequent garbage collection. I spoke with Shukert earlier this week; an edited version of our conversation appears below.

In the book, you never quite say that you went to Europe to find yourself (and you mother is certainly skeptical of the idea). But in the end, that’s exactly what happens. Obviously since it’s about your life, you knew how the story would end, but did you have a sense of the shape the narrative would take?

I suppose my resistance to the idea of “finding myself” (or at least, calling it that) has to do with it seeming so contrived. For better or for worse, I’m very much her daughter in that way: if it sounds too self-indulgent or navel-gazing, I’m dubious as to its value (I realize this might sound hypocritical coming from the author of a memoir. Rest assured, I have a lot of issues with self-loathing). But I also think that my initial impulse to go away came from wanting to lose myself, rather than find myself. I was sick of me. I felt like being in New York was exacerbating all the things I didn’t like about myself: the petty competitiveness, the anger, the terror of failure. And I figured if my life was inevitably going to be frustrating and disappointing, I at least wanted to be frustrated and disappointed in new and exciting ways.

Also, the book as I originally imagined it was going to be very different: I had planned a sort of light collection of comic essays about travel and being abroad, not all necessarily from this time. It wasn’t until I started writing that I realized that there was something under that surface, a sort of greater narrative, almost novelistic trajectory to this really focussed period of time.

Related to the previous question: if there’s a subplot to the book, it’s your coming to terms with your Jewish heritage. It’s not that you were ashamed about it to begin with, but somehow by the end you’ve embraced your background more fully—largely by settling down with a nice Jewish guy.

Being Jewish in Europe is a funny thing. My generation of American Jews have become so deracinated, so used to being accepted as part of mainstream “white” society (even if we don’t necessarily see ourselves that way) that it can be startling to realize that isn’t necessarily the case abroad. That’s not to say that any of the people I encountered were particularly anti-Semitic (except the neo-Nazis, obviously); in fact, I think they’d be mortified if they seemed that way. But Jewishness, in this case, my Jewishness, was something that was definitely conspicuous, and whether it was out of discomfort or residual guilt or just curiosity, people were unable to keep themselves from mentioning it. You can choose to get really huffy and defensive about these comments and leave everyone feeling guilty and alienated, or you can give people the benefit of the doubt. For my own sanity, I mostly chose the latter, and it had the interesting side effect of making me more comfortable and less reflexively defensive about my own Jewishness. And comfort with yourself is such a powerful thing: when you’re fine with something that is obviously discomfiting to someone else, you have so much more control. Self-hatred just leads to more hatred.

On a deeper level though, for me, Jewishness has always been totally conflated with my parents. I think the coming to terms with my heritage that you describe was really coming to terms with them. I had to accept the idea that their happiness and mine weren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. I could marry a nice Jewish boy because I loved him and he made me happy, and the fact that it also made them happy was a nice side effect rather than something that had to be avoided at all costs. I didn’t have to keep making a disaster of my life in order to somehow teach them a lesson.

Your use of imagery is extremely effective and entertaining; for instance, you write that Jerry Falwell looks like a “molten blob of Crisco.” Getting the images just right is important for any writer, but it’s essential when you’re trying to be funny. Are there any writers— humorous or otherwise—you look to as role models in this department? I was reminded of David Sedaris, which I’m guessing you have heard before.

David Sedaris is incredible at this, and I don’t think anyone can write in this genre anymore without being influenced by him; he virtually invented it in its modern incarnation. But for me, the master of the weirdly effective image is David Rakoff. There are numerous examples of this in his books, but they just come out of his mouth in daily life; I remember he once described this woman we both knew as having “a face like a sewing machine,” which was so perfect on so many levels, I can’t even tell you. Martin Amis is another one (although he’s not my friend); there’s one I always liked in his first book, “The Rachel Papers,” where he describes an acne-plagued teen-ager’s face as a “crumbling death-mask.”

_There’s this implicit idea in alot of travel writing that we Americans go abroad to make mistakes, then return to our sensible lives. What do you think that’s all about? I supposed people from other countries do the same thing, right?_I think that American culture, even in this period of our grandiose decline, is the international default culture, just like English has become the default international language. The American sensibility, especially to Americans, is like this cultural lingua franca. It’s very difficult to get away from, and because of this, I think most Americans, at least subconsciously, feel that the rest of the world is not quite real. That the things you do there don’t have consequences, the way they do at home where you can ruin your credit rating or screw up your employment prospects or be bankrupted by terrifying hospital bills. You know, now that I think about it, maybe that last thing has something to it. Americans go to Europe and go nuts because of socialized medicine. Because you can get drunk and smash your face in and not wind up with $65,000 worth of medical debt.

Did you look to other travel writing as a model for your book?

I read (and re-read) a lot of George Orwell’s essays about when he was in Burma—you know, “Shooting an Elephant” is the really famous one, all of those. He has this incredible way of managing to keep the action extremely immediate, yet simultaneously give comment. That’s extremely rare.

One of my favorite things about the book are the little digressive chapters, about things like the Dutch national love of Phil Collins or frequently-asked-questions about foreskins. Was this device was something you had in mind at the beginning of the writing process, or did it emerge along the way?

Well, I turned in this first draft of the book that, to my mind, was frankly kind of lackluster. It was right about the time that the third wave of” Eat Pray Love” mania/backlash was hitting (you can track the waves now, like feminism, or nausea) and there were first starting to be all these trend pieces in the women’s magazines about people trying to mimic her journey. So I started thinking about how some very misguided person might mimic mine, the things it might be useful to know before embarking on a transatlantic journey of public drunkenness and sexual misfortune. I always have loved reading the sidebars in guidebooks as well, those sort of “Lonely Planet” sections where you’re reading sedately along about some charming hostel and then in a sidebar it mentions that the building it’s currently in was used as a forced sterilization center by the Nazis. The terror of history intrudes, no matter how good some place’s croissants are. So the little intertextual digressions in my book are meant as a kind of send-up of those two phenomena.

But I also feel like memoir has become such a dominant genre in the publishing industry that it’s time to look for ways to reinvent the form, when you can, the way post-modernists did with the novel. It’s still kind of a stepchild in terms of the seriousness with which it’s treated in the literary world. It’s changing, but there’s still often a vague sense that you write memoir if you a) are really self-involved and not that talented or b) have a contract and don’t have an idea for a novel. I’m guilty of feeling that way myself sometimes. But I think that’s a fundamental misreading of the genre, which is actually its own discipline; it’s like making a sculpture out of found objects, you have all these things that are what they are, and you have to assemble them into something that transcends the sum of its parts. And for me the best way to do that is to experiment a bit, and allow the truth of one’s experience to encompass these little flights of fancy.

_Any plans to live abroad again in the future, now that you’re a happily married woman with a cat?_Yes, and we better do it soon before we have a baby and our lives are ruined! Just kidding. I’d love to go abroad again, maybe for a year or so, if I had a longterm project to work on. Being a little isolated from the mainstream culture of where you are is always the best place to actually write, because you have to keep yourself company. I’m working on a novel that’s set in Berlin right now, so maybe that’s next on the list. Just think of all the Nazi stories I could write from there!